with Scott’s.  The latter is greater in the dynamic than in the static department—­in scenes of rapid action and keen excitement.  His show passages are such as the fight in the Trosachs, Flodden Field, William of Deloraine’s ride to Melrose, the trial of Constance, the muster on the Borough Moor, Marmion’s defiance to Douglas, the combat of James and Roderick Dhu, the summons of the fiery cross, and the kindling of the need-fires—­those romantic equivalents of the lampadephoroi in the “Agamemnon.”

In the series of long poems which followed the “Lay,” Scott deserted the Border and brought in new subjects of romantic interest, the traditions of Flodden and Bannockburn, the manners of the Gaelic clansmen, and the wild scenery of the Perthshire Highlands, the life of the Western Islands, and the rugged coasts of Argyle.  Only two of these tales are concerned with the Middle Ages, strictly speaking:  “The Lord of the Isles” (1813), in which the action begins in 1307; and “Harold the Dauntless” (1817), in which the period is the time of the Danish settlements in Northumbria.  “Rokeby” (1812) is concerned with the Civil War.  The scene is laid in Yorkshire, “Marmion” (1808), and “The Lady of the Lake” (1810), like “The Lay of the Last Minstrel,” had to do with the sixteenth century, but the poet imported mediaeval elements into all of these by the frankest anachronisms.  He restored St. Hilda’s Abbey and the monastery at Lindisfarne, which had been in ruins for centuries, and peopled them again with monks and nuns, He revived in De Wilton the figure of the palmer and the ancient custom of pilgrimage to Palestine.  And he transferred “the wondrous wizard, Michael Scott” from the thirteenth century to the end of the fifteenth.  But, indeed, the state of society in Scotland might be described as mediaeval as late as the middle of the sixteenth century.  It was still feudal, and in great part Catholic.  Particularly in the turbulent Borderland, a rude spirit of chivalry and a passion for wild adventure lingered among the Eliots, Armstrongs, Kerrs, Rutherfords, Homes, Johnstons, and other marauding clans, who acknowledged no law but march law, and held slack allegiance to “the King of Lothian and Fife.”  Every owner of a half-ruinous “peel” or border keep had a band of retainers within call, like the nine-and-twenty knights of fame who hung their shields in Branksome Hall; and he could summon them at short notice, for a raid upon the English or a foray against some neighbouring proprietor with whom he was at feud.

But the literary form under which Scott made the deepest impression upon the consciousness of his own generation and influenced most permanently the future literature of Europe, was prose fiction.  As the creator of the historical novel and the ancestor of Kingsley, Ainsworth, Bulwer, and G. P. R. James; of Manzoni, Freytag, Hugo, Merimee, Dumas, Alexis Tolstoi, and a host of others, at home and abroad, his example is